Q: How do you insert a page break in Numbers?

You can't anymore, unfortunately. This is because of the fundamental differences between Numbers and Excel.

Excel is a spreadsheet-oriented editor.

Numbers is a format-oriented spreadsheet editor.

So in numbers you can maniuplate spreadsheets, drag them onto different pages, insert new tables, all on a single 'sheet'. You can't do this in Excel. Because of this nature of Numbers, there is no page break option.

gbrenik's description is spot on. There isn't really a way to insert a pagebreak within Numbers directly. What you can do is copy and paste the table into Pages or Word and let those programs control the page break. In Pages you can't Pagebreak within a table except at page boundarires. Word is a bit more flexible in this instance. You can insert a pagebreak within a cell and that row will then break across pages.

While I like and use Numbers more then Excel, there are a number (number... funny) of features I wish it had. For some things, Excel is simply the right solution. If you want beautifully presented spreadsheets then Numbers rocks. But it fails for complex macros, certain simple layout features (page breaks) and more. Somethings there are workarounds for and some there aren't.

David,

The cleanest way to break a table prior to where it would automatically break for a page, is to split the table. To do this, Select the portion of the table that you want to move down, grab it by one of the selected Row labels, and pull away to the left and downward. Drop the part you pulled away and you will now have two tables. Position as you like relative to the page margins.

A less fussy and perhaps easier way is to add one blank row where you want the table to break. Drag the border at the bottom of the new row down until the rows below jump to the next page. You may set the side borders of the new row to None to make it "disappear".

Jerry

"when I tried to drop the selected section, it just snapped back into its original place."

Drop it a bit further from the rest of the table.

Image of original table at top. Same table split into two parts below. Lower part of table was dropped about this distance below and a bit to the right of its shown location, then selected and nudged back into alignment using the arrow keys.

Regards,

Barry

David Rosen wrote:

 

I tried to follow your directions, but when I tried to drop the selected section, it just snapped back into its original place.

Hi David,

There's a bit of technique involved in this buisiness. I'd suggest that you take a copy of your document to practice on.

You begin by Clicking the Row Label of the first row of the selection and Shift-Clicking the Row Label of the last row of the selection. Then grab any one of the labels and drag it to a blank area of the sheet, letting it go there. If you drag the selection over another part of the table, Numbers thinks you are just going to rearrage the table, another powerful option where you can easily move a group of rows to place them elsewhere in the table.

Good luck,

Jerry

CAUTION :

There is an annoying drawback with the blank row tip :

if we don't take care to the problem, it will break the 'auto insert formulas" feature.

So, don't leave the row blank, insert a standard content with nil values so that it doesn't change the sums if the table embed some of them and set the ink used in the row to white.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France)  samedi 19 janvier 2011 19:49:52

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Nice, except that I can't make it work on a much larger sheet. Suppose I want rows 89 - 150 to start on a new page (which I do). Originally as part of Table 1 they start in the middle of a page.

So I select rows 89 to 150 and then after many experiments I find juuuuust where to click and drag to move it as a table. Hint, if the cursor is a hand, it won't work, but if it isn't a hand it still probably won't work, unless you are clicking on the label of the first row of the selection.

So I drag the translucent image of this block of rows off to the side and let go. Has to be to the side, because there are several hundred rows below and there's no way to get the drag-cursor "below" the existing table -- the display will not auto-scroll as  you drag down. So off the side and let go.

Now I have a Table 2 comprising those rows, but IT STILL STARTS IN THE SAME PLACE ON THE PAGE, i.e. half-way down  the page, exactly where row 89 was before I dragged it out.

So this did no good at all, I can't get row 89 to start at the top of a page no matter what.

I agree with the complaints about page breaks not available in Numbers. The bulk of the work I do is in spreadsheets - several dozen pages, 50 lines and 8 columns at a time.

Somewhere in the discussions, save as pdf with page breaks is not available with Numbers 3.2.2..  MB Pro current version operating system.

The help file for numbers says a page break can be inserted by entering  "Command and Return".  Either the instructions are wrong or the program is broken.

This issue was raised to customer support.  They tried and found the same experience.  The issue is to be escalated to the engineers. Hopefully, the issue will be resolved. How hard could this be?

However the program is described and however it is compared to EXCEL - Numbers is nothing more that a SPREADSHEET with an extremely important feature disabled!

I figured it out!  You need to "print" the document to a PDF file.  Hit print and use the popup window to check your formatting.  If it looks okay, select the button on the bottom left side of the print window that reads "PDF."  Change it to "Save as PDF" -- or something like that -- and hit print/done.  It saves the document as a PDF file with page breaks.  Took me a while to figure that one out, but it worked for me.

I figured it out!  You need to "print" the document to a PDF file.  Hit print and use the popup window to check your formatting.  If it looks okay, select the button on the bottom left side of the print window that reads "PDF."  Change it to "Save as PDF" -- or something like that -- and hit print/done.  It saves the document as a PDF file with page breaks.  Took me a while to figure that one out, but it worked for me.